by Simon Hawke
But from the vantage point of another time frame, he had experienced it. And it had killed him.
The tribesmen still trapped in the pass were run down and trampled by the lancers as they thundered through. Then the cavalry formed a line upon the plain and charged the fleeing enemy. There was no escape. The Ghazis died in the rice fields, run through by the lances and struck down by the cavalry sabres. Bodies fell everywhere as the lancers descended on the fleeing Ghazis and butchered them.
"Christ," said Hugo, turning away from the carnage down below. "I'm sorry, General, but that's more than J can stand to watch. I've seen enough of death."
Churchill was riveted by the spectacle. "They shall not forget this," he said. "it's probably the first time any of them have seen what cavalry can do, given room to deploy their strength. Henceforth, the very words, 'Bengal lancers' shall strike terror into their hearts."
As he spoke, a lone Ghazi sniper, who had remained undiscovered, hidden behind the rocks of his crumbled sangar, rose to a kneeling position and brought his jezail rifle to bear upon the surgeon. Hugo, whom he mistakenly took 10 be the commander of the British forces. As he raised his rifle, Lucas spotted him.
Re yelled, "Hugo. Look out!" instinctively, after so much time spent under enemy fire,
Hugo reacted by throwing himself down flat upon the ground. In an instant, Lucas saw that Hugo's combat-quick response had placed Churchill directly in the line of fire. In an instant of white hot, adrenaline charged clarity, he saw it all and made a running dive for Churchill — and landed on a hand woven carpet of Chinese silk.
For a moment, he lay stunned, unable to move. All he could see were the colours of the carpet, brilliant red, metallic gold and indigo a richly complex pattern, figured with dragons and stylised lions. Slowly, he pushed himself up and looked around..
He was in a large, circular room with a domed, observatory ceiling. The most dominant object in the room was a huge radio telescope. All around him were banks of computers and other electronic instruments he could not identify, with rows upon rows of blinking lights and dials and digital and video displays.
Laboratory equipment vied for space with exquisite Victorian antiques and bronze sculptures and impressionistic oil paintings. Books were everywhere, crammed to overflowing in tall bookcases, stacked upon tables and piled high upon the floor. As Lucas slowly stood, he turned and saw a huge, curved bay window behind him. The landscape outside was rocky and desolate. And red-orange. The vermilion sands stretched out for as far as the eye could see, nothing but an unbroken vista of rock-strewn, reddish-orange desert. And there were three moons in the sky.
"What the hell?" said Lucas.
"It does rather look like hell, doesn't it?" said a deep, vaguely continental voice from behind him.
Lucas turned to see a tall and slender man, with dark, unruly hair that came down to his collar in the back and a neatly trimmed moustache. He was gaunt, with dark, penetrating eyes and a sharp, prominent nose. He was dressed in a button-down white shirt, a silk tie with a regimental stripe, a dark brown waistcoat with a gold watch chain and a brown, tweed Norfolk jacket with dark wool trousers and expensive, handmade Italian shoes. He carried a hickory walking stick and wore a brown fedora. One moment, he seemed solid and the next, he was semitransparent.
He seemed to flicker like a faulty hologram.
"Darkness!" Lucas said. "What the hell is going on? Where am I? What happened to the others? Where's Churchill? Is he all right?",
Dr. Darkness raised his eyebrows. "Which of that plethora of questions would you like me to answer first?"
"How about where am I?"
"You are a guest in my home," said Darkness.
"Your.. home?" said Lucas, feeling totally bewildered.
Darkness put the walking stick down on a table and then moved across the room toward a sideboard where he kept several bottles of whiskey, a gasogene and a decanter.
Lucas stared at him with astonishment. He had never before seen Dr. Darkness walk. However, what he was doing wasn't exactly walking. Darkness seemed to be moving in a series of extremely rapid, stop-motion frame, as if he were illuminated by a strobe light. As he made his way across the room, he left behind a series of blurred, ghostly afterimages of himself that faded out like contrails.
"I was once able to walk normally while I was here in my unprojected state," he explained when he noticed Lucas staring. "However, it appears that the stability of my atomic structure is gradually degenerating. I'm having some anxiety over it, since there doesn't seem to be anything that I can do about it."
He poured himself a glass of single malt Scotch and then started to pour one for Lucas. He was at least twenty feet across the room when he held the glass out to Luca.‹;, but in the next split second, he was standing right in front of him, close enough for him to take the glass. Lucas blinked. He never could get used to the way the man could project himself through time and space. It was. unsettling, to say the least.
Lucas accepted the whiskey and took a hearty swallow from the glass. It felt good going down. "Why am I here? What happened, Doc?" he said.
"Nothing much," Darkness replied. "I've only saved your life."
Lucas stared at him. He felt confused. "But what about… God, what about Churchill?"
"Rest assured that Winston Churchill is perfectly all right,"
Darkness said.
"But… how? He was right in the line of fire!" Lucas said. "I jumped to shove him out of the way and… and the Ghazi fired and.." His voice trailed off. He had a horrible feeling that something was very, very wrong. "Doe, tell me what happened back there!"
"I simply tached you out of harm's way," said Darkness. "Otherwise that bullet would have struck you and you would have found it decidedly unpleasant. "
"But… then what kept it from hitting Churchill?"
"I merely interposed another mass between Churchill and the bullet."
"What are you talking about? What mass?"
"Your twin."
"My what?".
"Your twin from the parallel universe," said Darkness. "He was already dead, you see. Your friend Delaney killed him, which was quite convenient. All I did was move at multiples of light speed, take your twin's body and switch it with yours, taching you back here while I positioned your double's corpse in such a way that the ball from the Ghazi's rifle would enter at the exact same spot as Delaney's bayonet had when he killed your twin. It was actually rather complicated and it took some careful timing, but- '"
"Wait a minute, wait a minute!" Lucas said, staring wide-eyed at the scientist.
"What the hell are you talking about? What twin from the parallel universe? And what's this about Delaney killing him? When did all this happen? I don't remember any of this!'"
"Well, naturally. That's because it all happened in a slightly different timeframe,"
Darkness explained. He hesitated. “After you… uh… died."
"After I what?" Lucas suddenly felt as if his stomach were trying to turn itself inside out.
"Died," said Darkness. He cleared his throat. "After you died. Here, perhaps you'd better have another drink. Settle your nerves."
He handed Lucas another glass of Scotch. Lucas never saw him go back to the bar and pour it. It didn't even look as if he'd moved. He felt dizzy and there was an aching pressure in his chest.
— I think you'd better sit down," said Dr. Darkness. Lucas half sat, half collapsed into a large, leather upholstered reading chair.
"Jesus, Doc… what have you done?"
"Well, I saved your life, for one thing. You might at least say thank you. "
"No," said Lucas, softly. He swallowed hard and shook his head. "No, I won't thank you. I can't." He closed his eyes. "Oh, Jesus, I'm dead. Or I should be dead.
That Ghazi fired his rifle a split second after I leaped and… and that bullet should have hit me. It did hit me! My God, Doe, don't you realise what you've done?
You've caused a timestream
split!"
"I've done no such thing," said Darkness. "I have been monitoring the situation assiduously and my instruments have detected absolutely no evidence of a timestream split. I rather thought there wouldn't be, but I couldn't be absolutely certain." He shrugged. "Occasionally, one must take some risks in order to gain knowledge. Actually, it was quite an interesting experiment. You see, I could easily have deflected that bullet. It wouldn't have taken much, merely matching its speed and giving it a slight nudge would have accomplished the desired result. However, in that event, conditions of the past in a manner that might have affected the entire scenario, not only yourself.
"For one thing, a number of people had already seen you die," Darkness continued
— as Lucas listened with stunned disbelief. "That in itself might not have been all that significant from a temporal standpoint, but unfortunately, by the time I learned about your untimely demise, you had already been buried and certain significant events had already proceeded from that point, taking the factor of your death into account."
Lucas listened to it with a sort of shocked detachment. He simply couldn't take it in. Darkness was calmly talking about his death, about his having been buried, and yet, incredibly, despite having died, he was alive. His mind reeled as he tried to assimilate it all. The more Darkness told him, the crazier it sounded.
"I recall standing over your grave and feeling absolutely furious," said Darkness.
"You were to have been the vehicle for my greatest achievement, the living prototype of my ultimate invention, and you were dead! Well, granted, I always knew there was some risk of that, considering the highly dangerous nature of your occupation, but that was precisely what made you such an ideal candidate.- You routinely travelled throughout different time periods and were exposed to a wide variety of environments, all of which made for excellent field testing conditions.
Being a temporal agent, you were equipped with a warp disc, which provided a perfect failsafe system. And finally, I don't think that anyone but a temporal agent would have possessed the necessary abilities to deal with the stresses the field testing would have generated. You were perfect., However, to be on the- safe side, I also terminaled Andre Cross and Finn Delaney, in case anything should have happened to you. Just my luck, Cross and Delaney's terminals malfunctioned. The symbiotracer functions continue to work just fine, but the telempathic chronocircuitry embedded in the particle chips burned out during the process of molecular bonding. I still haven’t entirely licked that problem. In any case, that left me with only you. Your telempathic chronocircuitry survived the bonding process.
And then, like an idiot, you had to go and get yourself killed. Which meant that my project, the end result of my life's work, was also dead. And that, my friend, was simply unacceptable!
"I didn't see how I could possibly do anything about it, though," Darkness continued, "until I discovered that among the enemy soldiers who had crossed over from the parallel universe was your alternate self, your mirror image from the other timeline. He was an officer in the Special Operations Group-their counterpart to the Time Commandos. His name was also Lucas Priest and he was indistinguishable from you in virtually all respects, right down to his DNA. And that's when inspiration struck! The perfect opportunity presented itself when the twin Lucas Priest attempted to kill Andre Cross and Finn Delaney saved her life by bayoneting him.
"All this occurred after you'd already died, you see," Darkness explained, "shot down saving Winston Churchill’s life. I theorised that there would be little danger of temporal interference if I merely switched the bodies. Lucas Priest had died in front of witnesses, saving Winston Churchill's life. After the switch was made, a Lucas Priest would still be dead. It would be a different Lucas Priest, but no one would be the wiser. And if the switch did not affect the outcome of events in any way, then the danger of temporal interference seemed minimal, if not non-existent.
It required only that I dress the corpse of the twin Priest in clothing identical to that which you'd been wearing, use the terminal to tach you out of the bullet's path an instant before impact, then position the corpse of the twin Priest in such a manner that the bullet would impact precisely upon the bayonet wound, allowing the corpse to then fall to the ground an infinitesimal fraction of a second later, all of it occurring at a speed faster than the eye could follow or a bullet could travel. True, a close examination would have disclosed that the body had been stabbed first, and then shot in the exact same place, but there would never be such an examination.
There would be no reason for it. They had all seen what had happened, after all.
They would have no reason to suspect that anything else other than what they had seen might have happened at faster than light speeds. The result of it all would not only be a fascinating experiment in temporal physics, but it would also save the invention that I'd worked my whole life to perfect.'"
"This thing you keep referring to," said Lucas, trying to keep up. "This terminal… you said something about telempathic chronocircuitry?"
"Correct," said Darkness. "I haven't really given it an official designation yet. It more or less functions as a sort of terminal, or at least it makes you function as one, so that's how I've been thinking of it. Essentially, it is a particle-level. thought-controlled warp disc employing telempathic chrono-circuitry. It had to be initially triggered by a remote-controlled. tachyon signal, which is to say that I had to turn it on, but after that it became permanently armed. so to speak, controlled exclusively by the thought waves of the recipient. That's you."
"You mean…" Lucas felt his voice break momentarily and he cleared his throat.
"You mean to tell me that this thing enables the recipient to clock through time merely by thinking about it'!"
"Well, it would entail a great deal of control and mental discipline on the part of the recipient," said Darkness, "but essentially, yes, that's quite correct. So it helps to pay close attention 10 what you're thinking about, otherwise you might just 'tach off' somewhere, if you'll excuse the pun."
Lucas stared at him with horror. "Are you telling me that you've turned me into a living time machine?"
"Well, that's a rather colourful way of putting it," said Darkness, "but it's more or less correct. Now that the telempathic function of your molecular-bonded chronocircuitry has been triggered, you can travel anywhere you want, instantaneously, merely by thinking about it."
There followed months of carefully controlled experiments in which Darkness used. hypnosis to place Lucas into a trance state and then, through the medium of hypnotic suggestion, programmed him with specific translocation co-ordinates, from one side of the room to the other, for example. This sort of testing procedure, under rigidly controlled conditions, eliminated much of the danger, but the conditions could not remain so rigidly controlled forever. Lucas had to learn how to develop amazing mental discipline in order to control his telempathic chronocircuitry, otherwise a random thought could translocate him across time and space.
He had already accidentally "tached". or translocated back to Earth on several separate occasions, when he had found himself thinking about Andre and wishing he could be with her, explain to her what happened. And afterwards, each time, he had felt ill. There was something about the process that produced after effects, a pounding headache, pressure in the chest, profound dizziness and nausea. She must think she's losing it, be thought, seeing ghosts. He quickly pushed the thought away with alarm. Lucas needed to maintain his mental discipline in order to keep from
'taching off,' as Darkness had put it. The man's got to be crazy, he thought. How the hell could he have done this? He had changed Lucas's life-and death merely to safeguard an experiment. And as if that were not enough, there was still the question of what effect his being brought back to life would have upon the timestream.
Darkness seemed to believe that there would be no effect at all, or else it would be a negligible one. Lucas was not so certain. Without question, Darkness
was more versed in the mysteries of Zen physics than Lucas was, but then Darkness wasn't exactly normal anymore and hadn't been for quite some time. In his own bizarre way, Darkness was reordering his own reality and now he'd pulled Lucas into it, as well. He hadn't done it out of any altruistic motive; he had merely wanted to have his prototype telempathic translocator back. But regard-less of what Darkness had said, there was no denying the fact that something had occurred to "bump" the timeflow when he had snatched Lucas out of that bullet's path..
If, in fact, there had been no temporal interference as a result, then did that mean that nothing had changed at all? If Lucas went back to 19th century Afghanistan and dug up his own grave, would he find his own body mouldering inside it? Or if the Search amp; Retrieve teams had already brought it back, would they have cremated it according to the instructions in his will and scattered the ashes throughout time? Would he be able to walk into the headquarters building of the
Temporal Army Command and see his own name engraved upon the Wall of
Honour?
But then the fact of his survival meant that there had been a change. Perhaps, since Darkness claimed his sophisticated instruments had not detected any significant temporal fluctuations, the event hadn't been temporally significant, but there was a "ripple" in the timestream now-a timeframe in which Lucas had died and a timeframe in which he hadn't-and those two timeframes had to somehow become reconciled with each other if there was to be timestream split. Lucas knew there was no guarantee at all that the temporal ripple which Darkness had set in motion by altering his fate would not somehow build momentum in the current of the timestream, setting off a series of seemingly insignificant events that could eventually result in a massive temporal disruption-perhaps even the timestream split that everybody feared. There was only one way that he would ever know for sure. And it didn't matter if he wasn't ready. There was too much at stake and there wasn't any choice. He simply had to risk it.
